The irregular Nouveau Development Companion

Issue #4 for September, 17th

Introduction

Welcome to this weeks TiNDC, somewhat shorter as the last one, as this week was a slow one.

Criticism, ideas and questions can be send in my (KoalaBR) direction on the #nouveau IRC channel, I will try to address them in the next TiNDC.

Status

The homepage is slowly but steady growing. This week saw the addition of a "How to compile and install Nouveau" page by KoalaBR. More importantly, pmdata documented some of the known objects of the NVidia cards. Jkolb offered some quadro dumps, which were promptly added to the dump directory.

Darktama noticed something strange when hunting through some NV30+ dumps: A command with a size of 12 bits. After some discussions with darktama and pmdata it was concluded, that this was a kind of exception for video memory cache invalidation. It was found, that the NV20 cards had a similar command.

Marcheu decided, that it was time to write some code, so he and Darktama talked about what is needed in the so called "MiniGL" abstraction layer. It was found that at least this was needed:

setup a surface (perhaps based on drawable info);

being able to bind drawables as textures;

submit vertex data;

a hint that the incoming data is for video or not, since we really want high quality scaling for video
Current problem is the fact, that not all cards can handle all known texture formats and thus need a special case. Marcheu started coding and even tried to fit some 2D acceleration / setup into his MiniGL layer.

Darktama still tried to configure his card without any help from the nvidia blob (see last TiNDC), but got some random hangs during DMA operations. Seems as if it was due to some missing synchronisation and overlap of the DMA regions.

Help needed

We are still looking for developers, quadro stereo dumps. Regarding dumps, if you created dumps and added them to our homepage, please consider redoing them if they are older than 3 weeks. Renouveau has seen some additions and old dumps are of no help anymore.